Sound Masking
45dB are Australia's sound masking experts. We develop and implement advanced sound masking systems, ensuring the highest standard in design, installation and calibration.
Soundmasking
Our experience in designing, installing and calibrating systems large and small is extensive. Our advanced system consistently delivers the most accurate results with useful functionality including adaptive volume control and the ability to overlay other environmental sounds in selected zones. We believe that accuracy of calibration is paramount and through our own experience we know how difficult this is to achieve. If a sound masking system is not accurate it is worthless as speech is not accurately covered and inaccurate spectra can become an irritating buzz.
45dB Systems are the leading sound masking developers throughout Australia and New Zealand
Acoustic Fit-out
Revolutionary fit-out
Over the last few years we’ve seen a major shift in the use of sound masking. Not only to enhance the workplace for productivity, privacy and acoustic comfort, but to save construction cost too.
Traditionally, ambient sound is delivered by air conditioning or from other plant and external sources such as nearby traffic. As these are not constant or controllable in volume, or spectrum, ambient sound levels fail to meet expectations and impact on the performance of perfectly well constructed partitioning leading to privacy issues. In order to compensate for this, partitioning is often over engineered at excessive cost to guarantee performance
On both of the ANU projects featured on the projects page, sound masking has been used to ‘lock-in’ minimum ambient sound levels in order to guarantee partitioning performance.
By ensuring minimum ambient sound levels, partitioning performance normally only achieved using a slab to slab construction is achieved with a cheaper and more easily installed floor to ceiling design.
Outstanding benefits:
Lower cost construction - saving in ANU’s case $500k on each project build.
Streamlined construction. Once the services are installed in the void no more needs to be done and the ceiling is closed. Building walls in the plenum was, after all, not what it was designed for!
Floor to ceiling construction is easier to make good or better still, controlling ambient sound in this way open’s the door to modern moveable partitioning giving the end user endless ongoing flexibility to churn their space as their business requires.
Quieter offices are less productive
As counter-intuitive as it may seem, quiet offices are less productive places to work. When an office is full and vibrant, ambient sound levels are higher.
As ambient sound level increases, speech intelligibility decreases and conversations become less clear. [Example: in a noisy cafe try listening in to a conversation at close range. You can hear that others are talking but you can't understand the detail of the conversation. It is not distracting because you can't hear enough of it. Also, your conversation and their's are more private]
Conversely as the ambient sound level decreases speech intelligibility increases and conversations become more clear. If you are trying to concentrate on solo activity, nearby conversations are clearly audible and difficult to ignore. [Example: in a quiet library a distant conversation at normal volume is distracting and clearly heard as it punctuates the otherwise quiet space]
In the quieter office space, we are all now experiencing, each conversation interrupts your concentration frequently throughout the day and refocusing takes time and energy. At the end of the day, you feel tired and you didn’t manage to complete the work you hoped to.
If this sounds like your office, you are not alone as this problem is now rife in post lockdown workspace with fewer staff in the office.
There is an easy retrofittable fix for this called sound masking.
Our acoustic solutions let sound travel only where it needs to — allowing people to concentrate one minute, and collaborate the next.
